One evening a note came for me to call on him at his house, at 9 o’clock next morning. It was foggy and almost dark on the streets when I rang the door bell. I was shown into a drawing room dimly lighted, where, sitting in the half dark, by a low open fire, was a man I could have taken for William Shakespeare. The lofty brow, the intellectual face, the partly bald head, looked like no other. He did not see me as I entered, nor did he turn around, but went on looking into the fireplace. I looked at him a moment sitting there, and then said good morning. “Ah,” he said, looking up as calmly as if his whole attitude had been affected. “Good morning, take a seat. I read your play, it is melodrama, it is no account; that is, as it stands, you know. You had best hire a good stage man to go over it for you. You haven’t studied the stage, that’s clear, and that is what is the matter of our countrymen, Mr. – and Mr. – . They can write, but they know no more about the stage plays than new-born babes.” I sat there and listened to him in astonishment.
He talked much of himself, and related some of his methods of making plays play. But the real secret, he could not translate for me further than to say, “The way to write a play, is to write a play.”
I could not help thinking, as I sat there listening to the voice by the firelight, of the time when Boucicault had to sell a play for from $200 to $300, and of that later time when a play with his name to it brought him almost $50,000.
I took his advice as to my melodrama and had a playwright go through it with pencil and shears.
When I got home to Zurich a telegram asked that I forward the music at once. A London theater had accepted my play. Shortly the theatrical hard times set in; my theater closed doors, and that was the last of “Pocahontas,” a melodrama.
Thomas’ orchestra took some of the music later, and played it with success at the Philadelphia Centennial.
One morning when in London, I was invited to breakfast with Minnie Walton, the actress. She was at the “Hay-market,” playing with Byron, I think. She was noted then as the most beautiful actress in London. At the appointed hour I was at her house, but she was still in bed. I entertained myself in the drawing room for half an hour with her two pretty children. Then she herself came in, and I certainly saw a brilliantly beautiful woman. Her features were smooth and perfect, her complexion very fair, and her manners most captivating. She wore a white morning dress with network bodice that outlined a form as beautiful as her face. She had no wonderful reputation as an actress, but her beauty attracted many Londoners to the theater. Everywhere in the shop windows, one saw pictures of “The pretty Minnie Walton.” She had a power in London, all her own. It was “the fatal gift of beauty,” but a gift more attractive to women than birthrights and coronets.
November, 1875.-Upon my return from London, we went back into town for the winter. House rent has doubled here in four years. We now pay 2,500 francs for a centrally located apartment of seven rooms. Everything has grown dearer. The pension where we used to live for four francs a day now charges seven and eight and nine francs.
Zurich too is becoming a fine, modern, commercial city. The railway station is almost the finest in the world, and big, granite business blocks are building, that would do credit to New York or London. Where the city moat and a graveyard used to be, is now one of the finest short streets in Europe.
Almost the only house on this street, left of the olden time, is the “Ringmauer,” the home of our friend, Prof. Fick. Its front is an absolute wall of ivy, from the pavement to the gables. The whole front wall of the house is a part of the ancient city wall itself, built possibly by the Romans. The rooms are low, and the windows used to be ironed like a prison. Near by, still stands one of the old wall towers. Inside this ivy-covered old domicile, we have spent many happy hours. Many a time, over the walnuts and the wine, with the genial Professor and his family, we have sat far into the night and conjured up the people who were wining and dining here in this same room, may be a thousand years ago. Fick, a brother-in-law of Frankland, the English scientist, was a distinguished law professor in the University. He originated the Swiss railroad law, and knew more of American affairs than any German I met abroad.
In late years, he suffered horribly with rheumatism, and he had a queer habit, when severe attacks came on, of sitting down and comparing the severity of each attack with one in some previous month. He kept his watch lying open before him, and carefully recorded each twang and pain in a diary.
Spite of my sympathy for his suffering, I could at times hardly refrain from smiling, on hearing him exclaim: “Ah! that was a whacker, that catch was-must write that down. Let me see-lasted two minutes, pulse 80; this day, last year, minute and a half, pulse 100.” So for an hour he would sit, his feet wrapped in flannel, and his mind occupied in measuring and timing his pains.
“What do you do that for, Professor?” I asked him once. “My God!” he replied, “it helps busy my mind. I would die without this watch and diary.”
In the afternoon the attack would cease, and in the evening the students would see the loved Professor delivering his lecture as smilingly as if he had never had a pain in his life.
December, 1875.-Through Fick, Kinkel, Scherr and others of our friends among the University professors, we had free entrée to lectures when we pleased; could come or go. Scherr’s on France, and Kinkel’s on art, we heard throughout, as also Henne’s on Swiss history. There were numbers of American students too in the Polytechnic and University, so that our relations with teachers and taught were very friendly. The American students were always at our home on all American holidays, when the Consulate and our apartment were opened up together and decorated with our national colors. Speeches were made, toasts drunk, and a general good American time had. We ourselves greatly enjoyed these reunions on a foreign soil, and the students and American residents gave many proofs that they enjoyed them too.
I recall how just before one Christmas, Mrs. Kelley, wife of Congressman Kelley, of Philadelphia, who was then living in Zurich, asked me to go with her to help select a picture for an American friend. I felt honored that she should consult my taste. A very fine and expensive engraving of Dante at Florence was selected.
What was my surprise, on Christmas evening, to see her head the American party to our house, with this picture and a speech to the Consul.
The treasured gift hangs in my Iowa home, but the kind words of that Christmas evening are stored away in the depths of our hearts. It was the sign, not the gift itself, that gratified us most.
Most of us mortals are so constituted that to have the esteem of our fellow beings gives us a most comfortable feeling here, anyway, whatever it may do for us hereafter.
December 7.-Last night Prof. Kinkel invited me to attend a Students’ Commers or festival. There must have been a thousand students present in the big skating rink. They sat at long tables; the corps students in high boots, and wearing their corps caps, badges and ribbons. In front of every one stood a mighty schooner of beer. All smoked, and the narcotic cloud was so dense I could scarcely see to the stage. There were decorations everywhere, and a band of music in the gallery. There were sentinels outside at the door, and whenever a particularly popular professor was about to enter, signals were waved along the tables and to the band. Then, as he walked blushing through the aisles to the stage, pandemonium itself was let loose in the way of clanging glasses, band playing, pounding tables, hurrahing and singing, until the conquering hero was seated on the platform. It was a great time for the professors. Lunge, the chemist; Kinkel, the poet; Hermann, the physiologist; Scherr, the historian; Meyer, the chemist; Klebs, the bacteriologist, and other men with names that sound all over Europe, were literally carried to the stage on the wings of noise, smoke, music and lager beer.
These great Zurich professors are the men whom Hepworth Dixon calls the “Dukes of the Republic.” They are the only people in Switzerland appointed to their places for life.
Students near me got away with a dozen and more schooners of Munich’s best. I don’t know where it went to, but they have been known to drink twenty glasses at a sitting. For myself, to keep up appearances I did away with three glasses and a half, and absorbed smoke enough, without touching a cigar, to give me the headache for a week.
Here, as at the German Universities, the corps students fought duels. The most self-important young man in the city is the one with the little red corps cap, the big top boots, the ribbon across his breast, and the fresh patch of muslin on his nose, showing a recent engagement.
If the duelist has attended still other universities, he will probably have a half a dozen welts and scars across his face. He may not know much about text-books, but these unseemly welts on the face are signs of great honor; and as the man of danger struts down the street with a big-mouthed bull-dog in tow, he is a spectacle to behold. His greatest happiness in life is to have some passer-by turn and gaze on him.
And this was what Bismarck was doing at twenty; this, and shooting off pistols in his bedroom!
These University warriors are not so dangerous as their slit-up noses indicate. I have known of fifty duels in the past few years and not a soul, save one, was badly hurt. He did get really killed.
The offenses for which the students bleed and die are all petty, fanciful, and even provoked. Sometimes corps members are simply compelled by their different societies to go out and seek a fight and try their mettle. Ill feeling or enmity, I have noticed, has not of necessity anything to do with student dueling.
*****
November 20.-Had this from General Sherman:
“Washington, D. C., Nov. 9, 1875.
“Dear Byers: – I am indebted to you two letters, the last one enclosing the comments on the Prussian Army as developed in the Autumn maneuvers in Silesia. There is no doubt Prussia, otherwise the German Empire, is determined to keep up the physique, organization and instruction to meet any possible conflict, thus necessitating much loss of labor, and constant trouble in furnishing arms and food. We cannot attempt to follow her example, though of course we can learn much from their experience. General Meigs was present on the occasion of these maneuvers and will on his return make an official report which will be in book form, easy of preservation.
“Republican successes here this fall make the officials feel better, but the fact that the House of Representatives is Democratic will cause much confusion and heartburning this Winter, and until the nominations are made next Summer.
“My best love to Mrs. Byers.
“Yours truly,W. T. Sherman.”
CHAPTER XIII
1876
STORM IN THE ALPS-MR. BENJAMIN-KATE SHERWOOD BONNER-ICEBERGS-A SCOTCH POET-HORATIO KING’S LITERARY EVENINGS-COL. FORNEY-MR. ROBERT-A NEW YORK MILLIONAIRE’S HOME-A CHRISTMAS NIGHT HURRICANE AT SEA-THE TILDEN-HAYES FIGHT-CIVIL WAR FEARED IN WASHINGTON-DENNISON, THE INVENTOR-A STRANGE MURDER-THE WRECK OF THE SCHILLER AND LOSS OF MISS DIMMICK.
September 1.-Spent a day or so of each week this summer up at the Alpine hamlet, Obstalden, where we could look down a thousand feet into a blue lake, or up five thousand to the tops of snow peaks. Tried to read Milton up there on the green grass above the lake; stopped when half way through. I got it into my head that it was only a poetical paraphrase of the Bible. That is what Goethe thought once of doing, turning parts of the Holy Book into verse; but as the Bible is already done well, why not let it alone? Where is there anything in Goethe, or Milton either, to compare with the magnificent language of the Scriptures, and no human being would dare to change the thought. Curious, Byron, too, thought of putting Job into verse. Is not the book of Job already the grandest poem of the world? When among the Alps, I never cared to read anybody’s description of them; language is too weak, unless the language were Lord Byron’s.
One night near Obstalden, a terrible storm of thunder and lightning was leaping back and forth across the lake, and at moments every peak was illuminated. In the darkness the lake was at an immeasurable depth below us; a clap of thunder, a flash, and it seemed for an instant a bright mirror shining in the air. We had been coming down the path from Amden and had lost our way in the darkness, and when the lightning flashed, it was so vivid, we were afraid to go ahead. We took shelter under a projecting rock there on the mountain side, and watched the spectacle. All the artificial things that man ever dreamed of would be nothing in the presence of these elements, battling with each other over the mountain tops.
From peak to peak, the rattling crags among
Leaps the live thunder. Not from one lone cloud,
But every mountain now hath found a tongue,
And Jura answers, through her misty shroud,
Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud.
It was nearly morning before we could find the way down the rocky path to our little inn; but anyway we had seen a storm in the higher Alps.
A pretty little incident occurred here one day with our children. My wife, Helen and Lawrence were at dinner out under the castanien trees on the terrace above the lake. Two strangers got out of a rickety old chaise that had brought them up the mountain. “May we eat dinner here with you under the trees?” said the eldest of the strangers, a kindly faced, white-haired gentleman, to the children. Extra plates were brought by the landlady of the inn, and the children and the strangers had a good time together.
“And your name is Helen,” said her new friend at parting. “Yes, and what is your name?” answered the little girl. “Just Albert, please,” said the man, smiling. “Good-bye, little folks,” he called as he climbed into his one-horse wagon. “Good-bye, Mr. Albert,” called out the little girl, waving her hands, “Aufwiedersehen.”
In a few moments a rider hurrying up from the lake told the landlady in bated breath that it was Albert, King of Saxony, she had been entertaining. He was traveling in the Alps incognito. “Good gracious,” cried the landlady, “had I known that, what a different charge I might have made.”
September 25, 1876.-We are in the middle of the Atlantic. On the 16th, we left London on the Anglia. Mr. Benjamin, the marine artist (afterward Minister to Persia), is among the passengers. He made sea sketches, all the way. Kate Sherwood Bonner, a Southern literary woman, who put staid old Boston in an uproar last year by stirring up some of the effete clubs of culture that did not cultivate, is also on board. She is bright and beautiful, with her golden hair, and has the fairest white hands imaginable. A strange incident made us acquainted. She mentioned her home in Holly Springs, Mississippi, and in a moment I knew that once in the war times I was a sick soldier in that very house. I saw death scenes in its elegant chambers, in her own boudoir, of friend and foe, too horrible to relate.
The weather is perfect. We sail to Canada. There is not a sick soul on board. Everybody knows everybody, and there are concerts and recitations and fun in the cabin every night. All the day we play games on the deck. Nobody wants this journey to come to an end.
We saw an iceberg, and we saw a whale (yesterday). We offered the Captain $20 to stop the ship, put us down in life boats and let us row close to the iceberg. He refused. “Company at London would raise a row,” he said. We were so close, however, we could see beautiful little inlets and bays worn in among the high walls of the crystal island, against which the sea was dashing. The ice was several hundred feet high, clear blue-green, and the sight, with the evening sun striking it, was altogether novel and beautiful. We stood on the deck and watched it for twenty miles. When we were near to it, the Captain said there was a terrible drop in the temperature of the sea water. We were sixteen days reaching New York.
October 4.-Visiting the Centennial. By mere accident, found telegrams telling us of the sudden death of my wife’s father, while we have been having so long a voyage at sea. He was buried the day we reached New York. Owing to the length of the voyage they had given up finding us. William Gilmour was an educated Scotchman and a noble man, from near Burns’ home, where his brother John had been one of Scotia’s young bards.
In October, we visited home friends in the West, and returning East, staid a time in Washington, visiting at the home of General Sherman and elsewhere.
Horatio King, then having weekly “Literary Evenings” at his home, invited us often. These evenings did more to enliven a taste in Washington society for books and high culture than any other one thing in that whirl of politics and pretentiousness. King had been President Buchanan’s Postmaster-General. He knew almost everybody in art and literature in the country, and the people one met at his home were always interesting. I regarded it a great pleasure to go to his “Evenings.” He was growing older, but his intellect was bright as in youth, and his young wife attracted people of taste into their charming circle.
Colonel John W. Forney we also met again in Philadelphia, though I had known him in London. He was a man of great intellectual vigor, of magnificent presence. I once heard a Londoner say, “Your Colonel Forney is the finest looking American I ever saw.” He, too, like Horatio King, knew everybody. He had been Secretary of the Senate and was a famous newspaper man, who in his day ranked with Greeley and Raymond and Bennett. His self-possession was wonderful, his talk enthralled, and he had a heart kind as a woman’s. Our Government sent John W. Forney abroad as a Commissioner, just to “talk Europe into showing her wares at Philadelphia,” some one said. A better talker could not have been found between the two oceans. He was emphatically, too, a “woman’s man,” and he knew how to influence the public men through their better natures-their wives.
In December, at New York, we visited at the home of Mr. Christopher Robert, who, as already mentioned, built “Robert College” at Constantinople. He was a retired millionaire, and his home life must have been a contrast to the lives of most New York money men. It was the life of one of the patriarchs, not on a desert among his flocks, but in a luxurious home, in a fashionable quarter of New York City. He was a splendid looking “old-time gentleman” of seventy-five years. I never saw white hair so becoming and honorable to a man as his was, not seventy-five years carried so upright and with so much dignity. His large, smooth-shaven face was as rosy as a child’s, his eye clear as a boy’s of twenty.
He had earned money in his life, and he used it in doing good. His house was a sort of religious Mecca, where a poor man could go and be sure of help. His daily life was that of a Christian gentleman. Mornings, after breakfast, a bell rang, when every member of the family, guests and servants, were expected to assemble in a room for devotion. In a fine, clear voice, Mr. Robert read the Scriptures, and though surrounded by wealth, dilated on the littleness of riches and the greatness of a true heart. Then he prayed. It was like a morning mass. And I thought what a city New York would be, were it filled with rich men like to Mr. Robert. His zeal for sowing good seed was boundless. No man hung an overcoat in that luxurious house entrance, but on going away would discover the pockets filled with sensible pamphlets appealing for a higher life.
Evenings, there were always a number of pleasant people at dinner, and some delightful music. I recall an evening there with the Reverend Doctors Taylor and Ormiston.
Knowing Mr. Robert to be a man of deep sincerity and thought, I once asked him “if he thought the dead ever returned to be near us?” This was when out walking in the fields of Switzerland. “Most assuredly I do,” was his answer. “My lost ones are near me now-there in those roses, in the sweet grass, in all beautiful things. They come near to us when we are in a mood to want them to come. They don’t speak-but they hear our inward breathings-and when we worship beautiful nature, we are talking with them.”
I could not help thinking of that beautiful custom in certain parts of India, where at funerals a vacant place is left in the procession for the dead one who is supposed to be invisibly walking along with them.
On December 16, we had left New York on the “Elysia” and had tempests all the way across the ocean. On Christmas night, a hurricane set in, such as is not seen outside of the Indian seas. Everything on the outside of the ship was torn to pieces-not a life boat, nor bridge, nor boom pole, nor sail left. Everything gone. We were blown back thirty miles towards New York. The sea was churned into mountains of milk, and the thunder and lightning at midnight was something perfectly terrific. The ship’s hatches were all battened down with tarpaulins, and we were fastened in below. Spite of the precautions, water rushed down the ship’s stairways by hogsheads full. Two or three passengers lost their minds. Many said farewell to each other, including the ship’s officers, and we all thought ourselves lost.
On New Year’s Day we reached England, just ahead of another storm such as Britain had not seen in a hundred years. Hundreds and hundreds of coast vessels went to the bottom, carrying unnumbered British sailors and passengers with them.
As we passed the great pier of Dover, we saw how the mighty rocks composing it had been hurled in vast piles by the storm, as if they were boxes made of straw. The work of the engineers had been as nothing.
Man marks the earth with ruin; his control
Stops with the shore.
*****
While I had been in Washington, the contest was going on over the election of Governor Hayes and Samuel Tilden to the Presidency.
In official circles at Washington, the fear of disorder, rebellion, revolution, was extremely grave. Troops were being silently, secretly slipped to Washington. Many looked for an immediate storm. General Sherman told me privately he was preparing for it the best he could. “If a civil war breaks out,” said he, “it will be a thousand times worse than the other war. It will be the fighting of neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend.” He grew almost pessimistic in his views for the future of our country. “It is only a question of time,” said he, “till the politicians will ruin all of us. Partisanship is a curse. These men are not howling for their country’s good, but their own political advantage, and the people are too big fools to see it. We are liable to smash into a thousand pieces every time we have an election.” He was greatly moved, and almost wept at the thought of what would happen, were the violence then threatened really to break out.
January 4, 1877.-Again in Zurich. When we reached our home, we found the servants had returned, the house was warmed for us, and everything was in place as if we had not been gone a day; yet we had traveled 13,000 miles. Above the hall door, in evergreen and holly, were the words-“Welcome Home!”
How many of our American servants think of such a pretty, feeling act as that, for their employers!
*****
Some of our first Winter evenings here we spent in playing whist at the Dennison home. They are worth mentioning, for the people who played with us, and the story of some of them. Mr. Dennison had once been manager of the Waltham Watch Works, and it was he who invented watch making by machinery. He is called the “father of American watch making.” He is a tall, fine looking gentleman of seventy, with kind eyes, pleasant speech, modest manners, and universal genius. He seemed to know everything that concerns the working of a machine.
Our best whist-player at the table was Mr. Sadler, a kind old English gentleman who brought Christmas cake to my wife, regularly as the holiday came. He kept the story of his life secret. He was a mystery, and no one dared to pry into his past. We knew him to be rich, though he lived like a poor man in an obscure pension.
One day, just as I was in Liverpool on my way home from New York, he was murdered in a quiet park; no soul suspects by whom. Then we found out that he had been a member of the English Parliament, who for some mysterious misdemeanor, in association with his brother, also in Parliament, had to fly England. He got away by feigning sickness and death, having himself carried out of the hospital in a coffin. His wife, of whom we had never heard before, appeared suddenly at his death, like a specter. She claimed his money, which can not be found, though I personally knew he had thousands, and as suddenly and specter-like departed. It is all mystery, even to-day. His banker, shortly after the murder, received a mysterious and unsigned telegram from New York City, saying: “Give yourself no trouble as to who killed Sadler. He will not be found.” The murderer had not had time to reach New York. Who sent the telegram?
Another of that card quartette was the lovely Miss Dimmick, of Boston, a medical student at the University here. She was the first young lady graduate at Zurich, and she finished with great honors. Then she went home on a visit. On her return, we arranged to meet her in Paris, but one morning came the shocking news that she and five hundred others had drowned at the wreck of the “Schiller.”
Early one morning, in a terrible fog, the steamer Schiller struck a rock off the Scilly isles. Almost everybody was lost. The last seen of Miss Dimmick she was on the deck, kneeling in her night robe, her hands clasped, her face turned to heaven in prayer. When the peasants of the island found her body, there was a beauty and a peace in her countenance that touched them, and moved them to treat her tenderly. They placed her by herself, and when the officers came later to take some of the bodies away, they prayed permission to bear her coffin on their shoulders to the ship.
Boston City Hospital voted some money and named one of the free ward beds in honor of Miss Dimmick.
Now I recall those little card evenings at the Dennison’s with strange feelings.